Starting this year, we’re doing Independence Day resolutions.
I can’t believe I never thought of this before.
Most of us make some form of resolution for the New Year. We commit to hit the gym, read more books, finally clean out the garage, or eat more salad. We treat January 1st like a natural moment to look at our lives and decide to live a little more intentionally in the hopes that we end the year better off than we started.
But we usually just treat the Fourth of July like a day off—a celebration of something that happened. Burgers, fireworks, a parade if the weather's decent—basically, we celebrate the independence that other people won (a long time ago), and then we go to bed.
It never really occurs to most of us that independence might be something you're supposed to keep doing. How many of us treat it like a verb rather than an event?
I mean, the people we're actually celebrating certainly didn't treat independence as an accomplishment. To them it was more of a posture—a way of standing. They spent their whole lives asking some version of the same question: what's unjust here, and what am I willing to do about it?
A lot of them paid dearly for the answer.
Right now, we've got our 250th birthday sale running with Volume 3 of our America’s History series hot off the presses.
Volume 3 is not a victory lap. It covers 1791 to 1849 (the Whiskey Rebellion, the War of 1812, the British literally burning down the White House), but it also has Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act, and the Trail of Tears. These are the years when the hard-won ideas of the Revolution were first put to the test.
People ask me sometimes why we put the ugly parts of American history in books meant to inspire kids to love their country, but the truth is you can't teach a kid to celebrate the Fourth the right way (as a call to keep standing up so that the sacrifices of those early patriots don’t end up being for nothing) if you only ever show them the parts where America already got it right.
Do it that way, and independence just looks like something that happened. Something won and done, with nothing left to do but light the sparklers. But if you give them the whole story, something really important happens.
When they read about the Trail of Tears in the same book where they read about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman—people who looked at an injustice their own country was committing and rebelled against it, they start to really get it. The American idea was never "we're perfect," it was "here's the standard, and every generation is on the hook to drag the country closer to it."
Those people aren't heroes because they were born in a great country. They're heroes because they saw where their country was breaking its own promise, and refused to let it.
That's the kind of patriotism I want for my kids. Not the flag-waving kind that falls apart the second it meets an uncomfortable truth or reads an ugly chapter, but the sturdier, longer-lasting kind that loves this country enough to hold it to its word.
So this week, my family is talking about Independence Day resolutions. We’re looking around and deciding which injustice we’re going to spend the year rebelling against (and hopefully getting other people to join us!)
We’re asking ourselves, "What's something you see that isn't right, that you're willing to do something about this year?"
It turns out kids are natural rebels against injustice.
(I think we’ve got our resolutions for the next decade.)
And yeah, we know it’s not likely that we’ll actually defeat every injustice we’ve identified, but imagine how much we actually could accomplish if we all tackle the freedom-sapping laws and regulations that are happening in our own cities and towns?
Isn’t that how every meaningful rebellion starts? By concerned individuals who get together and decide to actually do something?
Our America 250 Mega Sale is still going strong. Just use code USA250 for 25% off all books & book bundles sitewide.
America’s History Volume 3 is shipping now, so if you've been waiting on it, it's here. And if you're starting at the beginning, we’ve got the perfect bundle for you.
I’d love to hear what your family comes up with if you decide to adopt the tradition of Independence Day resolutions too.
Who knows? Maybe this can be the start of something huge!
— Connor
